In the current computing paradigm, an application developer may create an application that utilizes multiple network stacks. In such a scenario, the application developer may implement a protocol designed for reliable multicast communications. The multicast protocol may be used to create groups of processes whose members can reliably-send messages to each other. The multicast protocol may be responsible for group creation and deletion, joining and leaving groups, membership detection and notification, detection and removal of crashed members, sending and receiving of member-to-group messages (point-to-multipoint), and sending and receiving of member-to-member message (point-to-point), for example.
In one example, an application server may implement a group communication protocol. An application server may generally refer to a program, or hardware implementation of the program, in an intranet or Internet environment that hosts a variety of language systems used to query databases and/or perform general business processing. Application servers may utilize multicast protocol to communicate messages between members forming a group in the application server. The members may be processes, objects, or other entity that can send and receive messages to or from the group. For example, a member may be an application instance hosted by the application server.